Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Abstract

It's great to have a blockbuster quarter or a revolutionary product or service, but true business excellence demands sustainability. Maintaining your competitive advantage requires a strategy that makes your business unique and carries you forward as the world around you changes. What makes a winning, sustainable strategy? Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage is a multimedia resource developed by ten faculty members in the Strategy Department at Harvard Business School. Included in this resource are faculty presentation, animated frameworks, print- and video-based case studies, and workbooks to help business leaders formulate action plans specific to their own companies.

Mobileye was an Israeli company, officially headquartered in The Netherlands, which was a Tier 2 supplier to the global automobile industry. After 15 years of building a leading technology for autonomous driving systems, Mobileye emerged in 2014 as one of the most exciting companies in the race for the driverless car. After going public in August 2014, which made its founders—Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram—billionaires, the company looked set to become the de facto standard for vision-based autonomous and ultimately self-driving cars. This case explores the company's competitive position, the challenges of sustaining its advantages in a highly competitive industry, and how it should work with Google, the publicly perceived leader in the self-driving revolution.

In 2014 Alibaba debuted on the New York Stock exchange, creating not only the largest IPO in history but this initial desire to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was denied due to the company's desire to preserve its partner's control over decision rights. Why did Hong Kong deny Alibaba's requests to list dual-class shares or to allow its partners to nominate a majority of the board of directors, and in the process turn away a superstar in Alibaba? Why did American stock markets approve of Alibaba's governance structures, despite the warnings of many governance experts? How can investors ensure that their capital would be deployed effectively by the company's top management?